In typical Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks, intermediate nodes, such as Label Switch Routers (LSRs), do not have any visibility on what kind of payload is being carried within the Multiprotocol Label Switching tunnels of the network. With growing demand for cloud based services, improving Quality of Service (QoS) and performing deep packet inspection are of concern. Further, while ingress and egress nodes, such as Label Edge Routers (LERs), do have visibility as to the payload, typical implementations of pseudo-wire service and Label Switched Path (LSP) require a unique pseudo-wire service/LSP label for each different payload type. With a growing number of services that each node has to support, there is an increasing burden of control protocol required. For example, a provider edge router may have two different customer edge devices attached, one being Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) based and one being Ethernet based. Separate pseudo-wire service labels are required to uniquely identify and transfer the ATM cells and the Ethernet packets, and the provider edge router needs to tell an attached provider router that both pseudo-wire service labeled payloads need to be encapsulated to the same LSP.